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Comment by lajamerr | Hacker News Reader

JPEG XL is the standard to beat them all. Like how Opus became the definitive codec for lossy compression for the web.

JPEG XL covers nearly every use case for images, even replacing GIFs with it's animation support.

Existing JPEGs can also be re-encoded losslessly into JPEG XL format/data structure and get significant file size savings. This backwards compatiability is very important in transitioning to web to JPEG XL seamlessly.

What I'm most excited about for JPEG XL is progressive decoding, I had been following the FLIF project for a while and was disappointed with it's lack of adoption. But it's future found itself in JPEG XL.

Without a doubt 5 years now JPEG XL will become like Opus and set the standard for next generation image formats.

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> Without a doubt 5 years now JPEG XL will become like Opus and set the standard for next generation image formats.

I wrote a little X11 screenshot tool last year; one of the reasons I wrote it is because I wanted to save images as WebP rather than PNG that most tools use, since it's quite a bit smaller. Not that I'm running out of disk space, but it just seemed nice; one of those "no, it's not really needed but it's fun and why not?" weekend projects.

Anyhow, I discovered that loads of stuff doesn't support WebP. This was unexpected as it's been around for ages and supported by almost everything, but things like uploading to GitHub, Telegram, and many services doesn't work. It was disappointing and I had to add PNG support just for that.

I fear that JPEG XL will be in a similar situation in the future, where loads of websites can and do use it for their images, but also loads of services don't support it so it's a lot less useful than it could/should be. I hope I'm wrong.

You could make a similar case for audio. GP described Opus as "the definitive codec for lossy compression", which made me do a bit of a double take. Opus is absolutely the technically superior audio format, but when you want to give users a file you'll be sure they can play, you give them an MP3.

I expect JPEG and PNG to become for images what MP3 is today. And I expect H.264 to become that for video. These formats are too ingrained, whatever their technical limitations.

Technologists consistently underestimate the power of backwards compatibility. Itanium was better than AMD64, DVORAK is better than QWERTY, and I'm sure Esperanto is lightyears ahead of the monstrosity that is English. But backwards compatibility always wins, because it fits what the world was already designed around.

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(To be fair to GP, they said Opus is the definitive choice for the web, which may be true for integrated in-browser playback. But in other contexts, well, Amazon sells MP3s, not Opus files.)

> Itanium was better than AMD64,

No, AMD64 is far superior, Itanium's benefits never materialized. Any BOTH offer backwards compatibility, anyhow.

> DVORAK is better than QWERTY,

Not by enough to matter except in extreme circumstances. I say this as a Dvorak typist.

> I'm sure Esperanto is lightyears ahead of the monstrosity that is English.

It's not. It is needlessly complicated. "Basic," "Simple," or "Technical" English (which came along a few years after Esperanto) is far simpler and quicker to learn.

> But backwards compatibility always wins, because it fits what the world was already designed around.

Besides all the above being incorrect, some examples like the rise of ARM serves as a count-point.

ARM enabled a class of devices that x86 outright didn't support at the time (and largely still does not). In my eyes, that's the exception to the rule: when something is not merely incrementally better, but actually a difference in kind. That's what it takes to supersede backwards compatibility.

I said in my last post that I expect h.264 to become the MP3 of video files—but if that doesn't happen, I suspect it will be due to the format's lack of HDR support. That's also a difference in kind—something every consumer will immediately notice, if high quality HDR displays become common in the future.

> ARM enabled a class of devices that x86 outright didn't support at the time (and largely still does not).

What time, and which class of devices? Certainly it's true of very low-power embedded devices, but those aren't of particular interest... Embedded devices can easily switch between architectures without end users even noticing.

If we are referring to ARM being used for more computationally intensive devices... Like smart phones, tablets, and servers, then x86 has always had competitive options.

The earliest couple Nokia Communicators were x86 based, not ARM. Years before they switched to ARM, the National Semiconductor (later AMD) Geode processors debuted and were surely competitive with ARM, having power ratings as low as 0.7watt. Blackberry phones came years later, and iPhone and Android devices much later yet. The OLPC project using Geode CPUs on their XO-1 certainly proves their viability.

> It's not. It is needlessly complicated. "Basic," "Simple," or "Technical" English (which came along a few years after Esperanto) is far simpler and quicker to learn.

I'm sure it's easy to say that when you are already an English speaker. I personally doubt it very much. Is there some data maybe that supports this point of view?

As a non-native speaker, I think it's "easier" in the sense that many non-native speakers already tend to have some exposition to English through music, films, and other media. For Esperanto, this exposition is basically 0 unless you're a geek and watched that William Shatner Esperanto film.

The amount of exposition varies based on a number of factors, but anything is better than nothing.

I see, that makes perfect sense. But I wouldn't call the language itself being "easier" but rather the process of learning it. However I don't think parent meant it like that.

> I personally doubt it very much.

It might help if you specified exactly what it is you doubt...

It's a simple fact that Basic English has a shorter wordlist than Esperanto, simple rules, and being based on English it omits things like gender for objects.

While perhaps exaggerated, the claim was: "it would take seven years to learn English, seven months for Esperanto, and seven weeks for Basic English."

Some references to start with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Criticism

https://englishharmony.com/english-is-easy/

https://academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/Basic_Englis...

The first doubt was around the fact that a language with the pronounciation background coming out of the English language will be "easier" to learn than a strictly phonetic one.

Just looking over the list of words in your last link, I'm pretty sure that any number of them would trip someone that is a blank slate. For example: "who", "wheel" and "humour" are vastly inconsistent with regards to how they sound. Having to learn these idiosyncrasies, even for 900 words, would be - in my opinion - more difficult than the basic rules of Esperanto (and Ido, which seems even simpler).

I would imagine that coupled with a phonetic transliteration of the common sounds it would be easier but then the language would probably become a different thing all together.

I hope that clarifies a bit.

I don't think you're right about H264 for video. Video is big enough that there is real money to be made in better formats.

In 2020, 90%+ of online Video are still served with H264. And then you have to factor in storage cost. Remember Network bandwidth cost continues to drop with clear roadmap ahead. While Storage, both NAND and HDD cost reduction has many roadblocks. Storing additional video in different codec can be costly depending volume.

> DVORAK is better than QWERTY

Not if you're a programmer, punctuation, which is much more frequent in programming languages than english, is a lot harder to type.

I've heard colemak is better for developers, but as a vim user, relearning touch typing AND my vim muscle memory doesn't appeal to me, so i haven't given it a serious try.

In vim wouldn’t you just remap everything so that the physical keys stay the same in normal mode, and only use an alternative layout in insert mode?

There's too much cognitive overhead if you do this. For example, to change a word we use `ciw`, which roughly means "Change Inner Word" as a mnemonic. There are quite a lot of similar keys with mnemonics, which would prolly make no sense if you keep the QWERTY keypresses on a Dvorak layout.

I find such mnemonics only useful for initially learning how vim works. After a while it's all just muscle memory and I don't even think about how to do stuff, I just do it.

I was at that point several times (using Neo2).

The problem is that there is too much to remap, basically you need every letter on the keyboard. And if you keep positions, mnemonics do not make sense anymore. "Change Inner Word" would become "JC," (on Dvorak).

If you keep the letters (instead of the positions) all commands in muscle memory do not work anymore. I tried to relearn those ... but in the end it is too much effort for too little gain.

These days, whenever I get fancy I just switch the keyboard layout to Neo2 when writing longer texts and switch back when going back to command mode. (I guess there is a way to automate that switch, that would be interesting now that I think of it).

> because it fits what the world was already designed around

There is this quote from Edward Bernays that I like

> “The great enemy of any attempt to change men's habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by inertia.”- Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

> Itanium was better than AMD64

I thought the consensus was that Itanium turned out to be a significant mistake and represented a misestimate of how we could utilise it in software?

Yeah, axiolite‘s reply caused me to read up more on the history of Itanium, and I think that was a poor example on my part.

> But backwards compatibility always wins, because it fits what the world was already designed around.

Early Itanium included a x86 unit. Intel tried everything it could to push it.

> and I'm sure Esperanto is lightyears ahead of the monstrosity that is English

A lot of the complexity in English comes from active use and adapting to new concepts and integrating foreign words. Hopefully Esperanto will never be in a position to suffer the same issue and join the ranks of Itanium instead.

> You could make a similar case for audio

It wasn't really my intention to "make a case"; just an observation/lament/complaint.

Oops, that was just a figure of speech, I didn't mean anything by it!

>but when you want to give users a file you'll be sure they can play, you give them an MP3.

Or AAC-LC. Which is so much better than MP3 while having the 99.9999% compatibility. ( It is pretty hard to find something that support MP3 and NOT AAC )

Apple didn't support WebP for the longest time. A bunch of fairly major sites started using them. While they worked in the browser, when downloading the image macOS couldn't open it. The same went for the video format.

I just tried downloading a couple and they seem to work now, but I've grown to hate WebP. Even if they open today, I likely won't keep anything saved as WebP, because I won't trust it will work down the road, where jpg and png will likely work for decades.

Apple could force the industry forward if they added Opus, FLAC, and JPEG XL support everywhere. Ok, they’re often the ones holding everyone else back in these areas.

It's not too wrong to say Safari is the new IE being the anomaly of all.

Steve Jobs was asked a question related to this many years ago [1]. Older Jobs was asked as well [2].

The trouble is that you may want Opus, FLAC, and JPEG XL, but someone else wants a different set, and someone else wants yet a different set... then in 3 years everyone changes their mind. There is value to some stability and consistency to these file formats so our media is durable and broadly supported over time.

I'm not sure Apple is the only one holding this stuff back. I just checked out a JPEG XL site [3] and it only shows partial support and it's hidden behind a feature flag. As long as this is the current state of things, Apple isn't holding back anything. It's simply not ready for prime time.

I get the desire for open source standards used for media, but they never seem to be as broadly supported, and for your average user, that's all they care about. "Can I view my image? Can I listen to my music?" If the answer is no, they don't care about anything else. Most users won't know if they are looking at a PNG or JPEG XL, or listing to an m4a file vs Opus.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48j493tfO-o [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmRNIGqzuRI [3] https://jpegxl.io/#tutorials

Can you share any links here of your tool?

Sorry, I haven't published it. At this point it (mostly) "works for me" but there are a bunch of things that don't (yet) and there are a bunch of caveats and problems.

Also, it's really not that interesting of a project as such, but it was/is interesting for me anyway in the sense that I now know more about image processing and X11 ("outdated", allegedly, but works fine for me, so whatever).

Telegram supports WebP in a very irritating way; you can simply copy paste and it works perfectly, but it assume it is a sticker and so it is shown sticker sized and without the ability to zoom.

Also ticks the HDR box!

As I comment elsewhere[1] it also has an experimental fast mode in tree that is crazy fast, using AVX2, NEON, or fallback.

Hopefully Microsoft patenting the thing someone else invented (ANS)[2] doesn't gum this all up.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31658871

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31657383

JPEG XL in lossy mode models SDR and HDR images using the same model (absolute color XYB). This reduces tweaking and makes it easier technically to create mixed SDR/HDR composites, animations or overlays. All other coding systems that I know of use a different coding method for SDR and HDR, meaning that the quality settings and other encoding parameters are slightly different for these modes.

Everything about JPEG XL sounds great, except that it takes about 34 times longer to encode an image compared to PNG.

Edit: Apparently there's an experimental faster version: https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/tree/main/experimental/fast...

Depends, are you optimizing the PNG? Because cjxl is a hell of a lot faster for a much smaller file than zopflipng.

zopflipng is a very aggressive form of optimization.

If it takes that much longer to encode then I am guessing it takes a lot longer to decode as well which I am going to guess makes it completely out for image sequences, film archiving, VFX work, high end photography, etc etc.

That is usually not true.

The time spent by high quality encoders is generally trying different settings to find optimals... decoding should be unaffected.

It may take less time actually since it can be parallelized. PNG's big problem is it's serial.

In fact, Apple introduced its own extension chunk to PNG to enable parallel decoding, by splitting IDAT into two halves, put a zlib sync flush between them and record the offset to the second half [1]. This kind of split is bulit into JPEG XL.

[1] https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/895-Co...

Unless nobody adopts it?

EXR seems like it does all of the high end pro features of JpegXL and more (including 32 bit color). JPEGXL can do some odd stuff like animated gif type images but that seems more like a web end user feature than something professionals would care about. I can see it replacing Jpeg / GIF but I don't see this becoming an industry standard anytime soon.

I kind of hope that happens. First of all, still charging for the spec is ridiculous. So most people really have no idea how (over)complicated or long it is, except by trawling through a C++ reference implementation. E.g. AVIF does this much, much better. Do we really need to support images with 4096 channels in a web browser? And the name is going to be super confusing; it's too close to JPEG.

I used to think this, but I've lost confidence over the last year. I literally work on the software that generates jpg files on Googles Pixel phones, and there seems to be no realistic path to JPEG XL adoption within the next 5 years.

Why not? What’s stopping the next Pixel phone producing JPEG XL images the same way the iPhone switched to HEIC images a few years back?

To first approximation, nothing. And it's possible that we will at some point in the near future. The problem is consuming it. You won't be able to view the photo on device until Android adds it, or until the gallery and camera apps add custom software decoders. You won't be able to share with anybody until Facebook/Whatsapp/etc add support. you won't be able to view online until the browsers add support....

How does it relate to JPEG2000?

I may soon have to recommend a lossy but potentially lossless image format for 3D medical images (with 16 bits channels), would JPEG XL fit this bill?

The future isn't here yet unfortunately.

I imagine the doctors would view these images in multitudes of ways(browsers, operating systems, image viewers) with varying level of support. So encoding in a standard that is yet to be entirely finalized and adopted is a bad move as of now.

You'd be best off with going with JPEG2000 still if that's what you prefer or DICOM.

Oh adoption does not have to be that good. It is for researchers right now, to exchange results. So the only requirement is that it is possible to use it with a somewhat mature lib in python.

I absolutely recommend JXL. It is developed by the JPEG Group as a successor to JPEG2000 and performs better in nearly every metric (big exception currently being encoder speed). JPEG2000 isn't really widely supported, but does have many more libraries available.

So unless you expect library availability and/or encoder speed to hurt adoption, go for JXL.

Thanks I'll give it a try!

you should use NIfTI, which is the de facto standard for 3D medical imaging.

not compressed, but handles the voxel-image space transform which is far far more important and quite complicated.

you can slap gzip on top of it and most libraries/FIJI will transparently decompress

Isn't JPEG patent-encumbered technology?

JPEG XL is a different technology than the original JPEG format. (JPEG is also the name of the organization that contributed to both formats.) JPEG legacy's patent expired in 2006 although lawsuits continued afterward. JPEG XL is royalty free.

The standard supported by a whopping 9 (!) apps! Sorry, but prevalence of support matters too, and PNG can't be beat there.

This is very misleading.

Some of those 9 "apps" include imagemagick, ffmpeg, exiftool, libvips, and Qt KImageFormats.

These libraries power a vast amount of software. Support is also in beta for Firefox and Chrome.

So if you are on linux, practically every app that deals with images will work. On windows and mac, it's probably less likely.

I wonder why companies with multi-billion dollar budgets for each OS release are such laggards at building in support for formats that presumably would not change much between each release.

For one thing, delaying support for basic features lets one ship them as hot features for future launches and updates.

Case in point, Apple making a fuss last Monday over finally allowing users to change file extensions in CandyCrushOS^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H iPadOS 16, a move some 51 years after mv was introduced to Unix on which that operating system is ostensibly based.

"So if you are on linux, practically every app that deals with images will work."

Linux has way more than 9 apps that deal with images.

So if you are on linux, practically every app that deals with images will NOT work with JPEG XL.

Their point was that most Linux apps (and a lot of Windows/macOS apps, actually) that deal with images with do so via one of the above libraries, and therefore will handle JPEG XL without even knowing what it is.

Yeah, but what is the file extension?

If it is .jpx, maybe.

Otherwise, no.

(Only partially kidding, unfortunately. Outcomes sometimes hinge on trivial details.)

It's .jxl, apparently. The wiki says so and jpegxl.io's online converter also produces .jxl-s.

If the format is meant to be the next defacto standard, wish they made the name more distinguishable. People without fully understanding it will abbreviate to JPEG as well and definitely cause confusion.

I’ve read up about JPEG XL in the past but a question just occurred to me: is it just an image format or is it also a document format? Can it replace TIFF as a container for multi-page documents/images?

No, it's not a document format. JPEG XL won't replace TIFFs by and large because it has a different use case.

TIFFs are more in-line with a combination of FLAC/WAV from the audio world. It's meant for raw data used in production/manipulation.

As a professional you would work with TIFFs/RAW photo formats and then master it in JPEG XL for mass-consumption.

I’m aware that it isn’t meant to replace TIFF, but merely having document/multi-page support wouldn’t do that (or at least, not for most pro usages). There’s a severe dearth of consumer-friendly multi-page static image containers that don’t start with the letters P and D and end with F, and it would be great if someone in a position of influence would suggest such a format (especially if it really were just “multiple page support” and not “everything plus the kitchen sink masquerading as a multi-page image/document format).

How well does JPEG XL deal with color spaces? I don't know much about them, but understand that not all color spaces are create equal, and data gets lost in conversions.

JPEG XL bitstreams always have a defined color space, optionally described by an embeded ICC profile. They are a part of bitstreams instead of containers [1] because they are considered necessary to reproduce the exact output. When converting from file formats with an ambiguous color space (e.g. PNG without color space information) cjxl assumes sRGB as far as I know; you can give any display color space to djxl.

[1] A JPEG XL file can be a minimal bitstream or an ISOBMFF container, where the latter can contain the actual bitstream and additional metadata like Exif. The bitstream itself should be enough for decoding.

Does lossless JPEG XL support 16-bit images?

JPEG XL supports 24-bit integers/32-bit floats per channel.

I gave cjxl a 16-bit depth PNG, told it to use lossless encoding, and it gave me a 16-bit depth JXL. Seems so.

> Opus became the definitive codec for lossy compression for the web.

never heard of Opus for images... must have been sleeping

:P I assumed anyone reading it would know Opus is an Audio-codec. Was comparing the paradigm of where I see image codecs going with a similar one that happened in audio.

They are also common in that they are effectively two different codecs combined.

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